2020 Political Chatter

[vertical_doug]

The US Senate lead the world at this, bitd.
C-Span has long interview with the author, worth your time.
Attachment 117301

Senate needs to lift their game.

[ColonelJLloyd]

^haha

Hands up! Defense! Defense!

[guido]

All the Republican rats

Ann Telanes in the Washington Post

All of the state attorneys general and U.S. Congress members who collaborated with President Trump in his attempt to subvert the Constitution and stay in office.

[Too Tall]

Ann has a huge talent, thanks for that.

Is it Taiwan where they famously threw pig intestines at each other? Note, they were clean intestines which is basically a sin to waste good chittlin's. Amirightoramiright?

[echappist]

Not sure about fighting with something offal, but back 20-30 years ago (about a decade after Taiwan transitioned from one-party rule to a full representative democracy), legislators were literally trading punches. Then again, I was under the impression that a lot of it was staged.

[jclay]

The main point, however, is that under Reagan, irrationality and hatred for facts began to take over the G.O.P."

Reagan popularized, ideologically codified really, a base hatred of the very notion of government, wrapped in the flag of course. He laid the idealogical cornerstone for the destruction we're seeing and there's no knowing where or if it can be stopped. The USA's widely distributed industrial topography and concomitant broad distribution of wealth which included good paying jobs for a large percentage of our population of relatively unskilled, low knowledge workers, cannot and will not be restored. Heap our social/racial/idealogical/religious/economic, resource and environmental stressors, both domestic and global, on top of that and we've got vastly more than merely an unprecedented problem on our hands; we're living the decline of yet another superpower of it's time, in a long line of superpower declines; but this time humanity is killing the planet, too.

I'd be happy to be wrong but I don't see much likelihood of a pleasant outcome.

[guido]

Trump Be Gone: The Easy Way

Barry Blitt in the current New Yorker

[rwsaunders]

There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics...to paraphrase Samuel Clemens and there are Trump’s statistics.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/18/polit...ers/index.html

[guido]

The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media | New York Times

"Antonio Mugica was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots.

It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry: electronic voting machines. He began building a global company that ultimately provided voting machinery and software for elections from Brazil to Belgium and his native Venezuela. He even acquired an American company, then called Sequoia.

Last month, Mr. Mugica initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.

“Of course I was surprised, but at the same time, it was pretty clear that these people were trying to discredit the election and they were throwing out 25 conspiracy theories in parallel,” he told me in an interview last week from Barbados, where his company has an office. “I thought it was so absurd that it was not going to have legs.”

But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.” Mr. Giuliani declared on Twitter that the company “was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?”

Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.

“Sidney Powell is out there saying that states like Texas, they turned away from Dominion machines, because really there’s only one reason why you buy a Dominion machine and you buy this Smartmatic software, so you can easily change votes,” the Newsmax host Chris Salcedo said in one typical mash-up on Nov. 18. Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business reported on Nov. 15 that “one source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor.”

Here’s the thing: Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.

In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle. Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”"

[rwsaunders]

Rupert Murdoch receives the vaccine...the arrogant fear death more so than the common man. But wait, I thought that Fox News was still claiming that COVID-19 is just part of a larger scheme to remove Trump?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...-vaccine-in-uk

[mzilliox]

and their supporters continue to make excuses for their behavior? why do we allow such obvious bullshit as voters? i dont know... but its weird that folks still want to do things this way. guess they dont, but theres no better ideas, and any mention of other parties for some reason is dumb. i dont know why? one party is completely incapable of human governance at this point, seems long overdue to be replaced by something more useful for real human beings and not Corporations.

[Paul Jacobs]

Rupert Murdoch receives the vaccine...the arrogant fear death more so than the common man. But wait, I thought that Fox News was still claiming that COVID-19 is just part of a larger scheme to remove Trump?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...-vaccine-in-uk

It appears from the Guardian report that he was offered the vaccine, via his GP in Oxfordshire, when his turn came up through the NHS. As an 89 year old he would be high on the list.

[rwsaunders]

It appears from the Guardian report that he was offered the vaccine, via his GP in Oxfordshire, when his turn came up through the NHS. As an 89 year old he would be high on the list.

I read that as well Paul. I just find it quite arrogant in accepting his "turn in line", in that he's making part of his living from an organization like Fox News, which has been hell bent on keeping Trump in office and has used the pandemic as a propaganda tool, in favor of their stooge.

[classtimesailer]

That the attorney batting for the paperless ballot company is the same guy who defended a beef processor from criticism is too perfect. We shouldn't know what we're eating and we shouldn't know how our votes are counted.

"...And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”"

I'm done voting, I'm done eating beef, and I'm done...

[vertical_doug]

That the attorney batting for the paperless ballot company is the same guy who defended a beef processor from criticism is too perfect. We shouldn't know what we're eating and we shouldn't know how our votes are counted.

"...And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”"

I'm done voting, I'm done eating beef, and I'm done...

I think the voting issue is a bit different. They have answered the questions and yet the same accusations keep being regurgitated without any evidence. A letter from a lawyer does not cause 3 Corporations to run retractions. I think the corporate lawyers for Fox, OAN and Newsy explained to management the anchors were too far out over the ski tips in libel laws.

[j44ke]

I think the voting issue is a bit different. They have answered the questions and yet the same accusations keep being regurgitated without any evidence. A letter from a lawyer does not cause 3 Corporations to run retractions. I think the corporate lawyers for Fox, OAN and Newsy explained to management the anchors were too far out over the ski tips in libel laws.

Yep, the letter just laid it all out in perfect three dimensions how potentially screwed they are and how much is behind the floodgates. And three broadcasts of an interview with a computer expert isn’t going to get them off the hook. Libel cases are notoriously difficult to win in the US, and plenty of people are commenting on how strong a case this one is.

[theflashunc]

Yep, the letter just laid it all out in perfect three dimensions how potentially screwed they are and how much is behind the floodgates. And three broadcasts of an interview with a computer expert isn’t going to get them off the hook. Libel cases are notoriously difficult to win in the US, and plenty of people are commenting on how strong a case this one is.

They've also got one of the country's leading libel lawyers running the suit. They're ain't coming to play, and the networks are starting to realize that.

[Mark Kelly]

I presume TheRump himself is protected from a libel suit while he's in office. Come January 21 will he have to watch what he tweets?

[mjbabcock]

https://www.axios.com/trump-white-ho...3b18529c9.html
“Trump thinks everyone around him is weak, stupid or disloyal — and increasingly seeks comfort only in people who egg him on to overturn the election results. We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are by the conversations unfolding inside the White House.”

Guy is basically a nutcase. It’s exactly what many of us have been saying for years...he’s a danger to this nation.

[theflashunc]

I presume TheRump himself is protected from a libel suit while he's in office. Come January 21 will he have to watch what he tweets?

Yup. He'll also be subject to those social media platforms banning his account for shit posting, which he doesn't have to worry about currently given Twitter's idiotic rules.